LIFE SCIENCES COMPANIES NEED A HEALTHY ECOSYSTEM TO THRIVE AND GROW

Patheon, part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, supports drug development

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a world leader in serving science, with annual revenues of approximately $35 billion. The company provides industry-leading pharmaceutical services for drug development, clinical trial logistics and commercial manufacturing through its Patheon brand.

Patheon has five sites in the UK, including in Swindon and at Milton Park.

Its Milton Park facility, which has a workforce of around 50, provides early phase development with strong links to both larger scale development and clinical labelling, packaging, and distribution sites in the Thermo Fisher network.

Coming up with a potentially life-changing idea may be the easy part. Making it happen needs an army of help.

And for those working in the highly complex life sciences sector, that will need to be from experienced professionals who have the right knowledge to help guide the rookie entrepreneur through the challenges they’re likely to face.

This ranges from law firms that understand the intricacies of intellectual property and can offer support to entrepreneurial companies in a highly regulated and competitive sector, to landlords who understand that a young company needs flexibility in office and lab space. This enables them to respond to fast growth or, sometimes, scaling back if research and development temporarily stalls.

Then there are the architects and construction companies that understand specific requirements that must be met when building a science laboratory – where good ventilation is essential and other facilities, such as fume cupboards, need to be correctly designed and installed.

There are dedicated manufacturers for the life sciences sector too, and suppliers to those manufacturers – it’s a long supply chain and pretty much all of them will need to meet stringent regulations to operate in the life sciences sector.

The Swindon site, which has a much larger workforce of around 380, is a centre of excellence for speciality pharma solutions. Last year Thermo Fisher expanded the 30,000 sq ft site into a new full scale commercial manufacturing facility, and cold chain storage for vaccines requiring ultra-low temperatures.

Supporting cancer diagnosis and the treatment of disease

Canadian company Nordion, which has a major base at Milton Park, is a leading provider of medical isotopes (used by medical professionals to diagnose and treat health conditions such as heart disease and cancer), and gamma technologies which are used in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease and infection. Nordion’s products are used daily by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, medical-device manufacturers, hospitals, clinics and research laboratories.